Toughs Page 16

  1:55 p.m.

  In a knit cap and a khaki work shirt under a jacket frayed at the cuffs, Loretto crossed Gina's street looking like half the other out-of-work young men in the neighborhood. He pushed open the door to her building, hurried up the stairs, and knocked softly on her apartment door. Lottie had dropped him off on the corner and would be back for him in a half hour. Vince was in the city for a meeting, something to do with the kidnapping of George Immerman back in August. From what Loretto could gather, Vince had found himself short of money after buying his way into Diamond's organization and so had kidnapped George Immerman and taken away fifty grand in ransom from his brother, Connie. The story was Patsy and Vince had grabbed George right out of the swanky club Connie ran in Harlem. Now that job was causing problems for some mug who ran one of Vince's speaks, and Vince was here trying to get it straightened out. Loretto wasn't in on the higher-up workings of Vince's bootlegging operation. He was doing the same things he did for Gaspar: loading trucks, providing muscle when needed. When he'd heard Vince and Lottie were coming into the city, he hitched a ride.

  Gina opened the door, looked over Loretto in his workman's garb, and stepped back to let him in. Her eyes were red and she had a sleep scar high on her cheek, near her eye. Her hair was mussed on the same side as the scar. Loretto had expected an excited hug. He was surprised by the noncommittal way she simply stood aside to let him in. "You've been sleeping," he said, and he touched the mark on the side of her face.

  "Fell asleep at the kitchen table." Gina motioned toward the table and the coffee cup as if she too was surprised to learn that she had fallen asleep there. "Where have you been?" she asked. "You want coffee?" She started for the stove. On the way she added, as if it wasn't a big deal, "You missed your friend Dominic's funeral."

  Loretto took a seat on the couch, in a bright rectangle of sunlight com ing through the living room window. He folded his hands in his lap and waited.

  "Well?" Gina asked, with her back to him. "Do you want coffee?" When he didn't answer, she turned to face him, though she remained rooted at the stove.

  "There was nothing I could have done about Dominic."

  "Did I say there was? All I asked is if you want coffee."

  "Stop it," Loretto said. "I don't have a lot of time."

  "Well, I want coffee." Gina poured herself a cup and carried it with her into the living room. She sat on the opposite end of the sofa from Loretto.

  "What is it?" Loretto asked. "Why are you angry?" He pulled a pack of Luckies from his shirt pocket and tapped out a cigarette. Before he could put the pack away, Gina snatched it from him, took a cigarette for herself, and tossed the pack onto the coffee table. "Dominic," she said. "Your friend Dominic. Our friend. You missed his funeral."

  Loretto found a lighter in his jacket pocket, lit Gina's cigarette first and then his own. His heart was beating fast and when he tried to speak the words stuck in his throat.

  "Say something." Gina went to the kitchen, where she took a big cutglass ashtray from a cabinet and carried it back to the coffee table.

  Loretto watched her, the way she looked in her black dress—still young and slim, her hair bouncing a little with each step, but a hint in the black mourning dress of all the old Italian women he'd seen in church every Sunday of his childhood. He willed his heart to beat slower. Whatever was happening with him, the jumpiness and confusion, he didn't think it was obvious on his face. "I couldn't come to the funeral," he said. "It would have been dangerous for everybody."

  "And why is that, Loretto? Is somebody looking to kill you, too?"

  Gina knew the answer to her question. Everybody knew. Without Don Maranzano around, there was no one to protect him from Dutch or Cabo. Luciano, who might be worried that Loretto would want to avenge Domi nic's death—even Luciano might want him dead. "I don't have to tell you," Loretto said. "You know the score."

  If Gina felt anything at all for Loretto, it didn't show on her face. The two of them sat side by side on her couch and talked to each other like two strangers in the midst of a business negotiation. "So what are you doing here?" Gina asked. "Could I be in danger, too, because you're here?"

  Loretto took Gina's chin in his hand. He looked into her eyes, demanding an answer to a question he hadn't asked. He wanted to know something, though now he didn't know what.

  Gina pulled away and got to her feet. "You should go."

  "That's it?" Loretto stubbed out his cigarette. "Just like that?"

  For the briefest of moments, Gina's hard veneer cracked and her eyes softened—and then the hardness returned. "I said you should go," she repeated, and she went to the door and held it open for him.

  Loretto left without glancing again in her direction. On the stairs, on the way down to the street, he felt light-headed. He didn't know what had happened. He zipped his jacket up to his neck and yanked his cap from his pocket and fixed it on his head, pulling the brim down low. He stepped out into the sunlight and the cold. On the sidewalk, on his way to the corner where Lottie would pick him up, he walked along without thinking, his head empty, his eyes on the slabs of deep blue slate at his feet.

  Monday - September 28, 1931

  10:00 p.m.

  Lottie was waiting at the warehouse. She was standing in a pool of light, in front of an open garage door, surrounded by darkness and the rush of a crisp breeze that whipped through the grass at her feet. The way she was dressed, in heels and stockings and a dark skirt and yellow blouse under a jacket that looked like it had been tailored to ft her waistline, she might have been waiting for a date to take her dancing in the city.

  "Mister," Lottie said, "can you give a girl a ride?"

  Loretto kissed her on the cheek as Tuffy jumped down from the cab of a stake truck and joined them. Loretto and Tuffy had just returned from delivering a shipment of hooch to an Albany roadhouse.

  "Hey, beautiful," Tuffy said to Lottie, "what's the rumpus?"

  "Vince sent me to fetch you boys," she said. "Big meeting at Florence's place."

  "You don't say? What about?"

  "What do you think?"

  With Vince spending most of his time in Albany, Dutch and Cabo, Terranova and Luciano, and the others—they were all moving on his territories, hijacking his delivery trucks, blowing up his speakeasies and beer drops, and in general making life rough on anybody who worked for him. It was no secret Vince was going to have to deal with them. "Something new happen?" Tuffy asked.

  "Somebody threw a pineapple into the Mad Dot." Lottie's eyes went wide and Tuffy laughed.

  "Looks like trouble, then," Loretto said.

  "Good guess, Einstein," Tuffy said. "How much damage to the club?"

  "Shut it down," Lottie said. "I know that much."

  "Anybody killed?"

  "Nah. It was closed. Just blew the place up."

  "So it's right now," Tuffy asked, "this meeting?"

  "I'll drive Loretto," Lottie said. "I need to talk to him about something. You meet us there."

  "Jeez!" Tuffy fingered the peach fuzz on his face as if he needed a shave. "They could give a guy a chance to get cleaned up at least."

  "Ah, you know you're handsome." Lottie yanked the bill of Tuffy's cap down over his eyes before she took Loretto by the hand and pulled him off into the shadows where her car was parked.

  Once in the car, Loretto asked, "Who'll be at this meeting?"

  "Everybody." Lottie hit the gas and sped away from the warehouse.

  "Slow down. You'll get us killed on these dirt roads."

  Lottie shifted up another gear and sailed wide around a curve. The car kicked up a rooster's tail of dust behind them as the headlights cut two clear lines through the dark.

  Loretto braced himself.

  Lottie laughed and said, "I love going fast."

  "I can see." Loretto watched the trees flying past him only inches from the car. "Maybe for my sake," he said, "you could slow it down a bit?"

  Lottie glanced into the rearview mirror. Whe
n she saw nothing behind her, she downshifted and eased off the gas. "I hate it out here," she said. "Nothin' but bugs and rubes."

  "It's not all that bad."

  "Yeah? Don't you miss Gina? Aren't you lonely?" Lottie had a way of making everything she said suggestive. He didn't know exactly what she was suggesting, but it made him laugh.

  "So what did you want to talk to me about?"

  "Vince." Lottie's manner changed the instant she said his name. "Listen," she said, "he respects you, Loretto. You have to talk to him."

  "About?"

  "About going off half-cocked and shootin' it out with Dutch and the rest."

  "Is that what he's planning? Is that what this meeting's all about?"

  "Sure," Lottie said. "Didn't I already say that?"

  "You didn't say anything about shootin' it out with Dutch."

  "Well, that's what's comin'," Lottie said, "unless you can talk some sense into him."

  "What about you? He's not listening to you?"

  "He's got himself convinced that if he doesn't hit back hard, they'll walk all over him." Lottie pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead as if her head suddenly hurt.

  "He might be right about that," Loretto said.

  "Well, sure he's right!" Lottie yelled. "But he's got to pick his spots, don't he? You think Dutch is stupid? He wants Vince back in the city, where Mulrooney and the coppers are gunnin' for him. All he's doing is tryin' to get Vince to show his face. He figures between his boys and the Combine and Mulrooney, somebody's gonna get Vince. Dutch isn't stupid," she repeated. "It's Vince who's being stupid now."

  "Did you tell Vince all this?"

  "Sure, I told him," Lottie said. "He ain't listenin'."

  Loretto rolled his window down a little. "I'll talk to him," he said, "but I don't know what good it'll do."

  "Tell him this," Lottie said. Her eyes were on the road, though Loretto could see she was looking inward. "Sure, they're walking all over him now—but he needs to wait for the right moment to hit back. He can't let himself get pulled into a fight on their terms. You see what I'm saying?"

  "Yeah," Loretto said. "I get it."

  "If he goes off half-cocked like this, it'll be bad for all of us."

  Loretto stretched and then slumped back against the door and window. Lottie's hand was still pressed to her forehead, her fingers reaching up under her hat's cute bow. She seemed frozen like that, her mind a million miles away while her body sat up straight in the driver's seat and guided the car over the road. In that moment, the features of her face concentrated in thought, she didn't look like the dame everybody said she was, the broad who'd turned up one day running a restaurant in midtown with Sam Westin, then dropped Sam when Vince came around. Everybody figured it was Lottie who pushed Vince to make the break from Dutch. They called her Queen Lottie. Rumor was she had a stash of money from a divorce, and she used it to help Vince start up his operation. She was supposed to be tough and shrewd. Watching her while she drove, Loretto had a hard time making what he'd heard about her jibe with what he saw. She looked like a girl lost in worry.

  Loretto said, "Vince can take care of himself," and Lottie snapped back to life. Her hand fell from her hair, she clasped the wheel at ten and two, and she offered Loretto a quick smile.

  "You know what I'd like to know?" Loretto was still slumped in his seat as if about to take a nap. "Who it was killed Dominic and Gaspar. Nobody's got a name for me."

  "I'm sorry about your friend," Lottie said.

  "But you don't know anything?"

  "Only what I heard, same as everybody else." The car went quiet for a while before she added, "Does it matter really who pulled the trigger? You and Vince, it's the same enemies, right? Luciano, Dutch, Madden, Cabo— the whole lot of them. They're all a bunch of greedy bastards."

  "You've got guts," Loretto said. "You and Vince. You're talking

  about the toughest guys in the city. They practically got an army behind them."

  "Sure," Lottie said, "but they're not the toughest. Vince is. That's the thing, Loretto. It's what I'm always telling Vince. It's the guy's willing to put a bullet in you if you don't do what he says—that's the guy winds up on top. That, and you got to be smart about it. Look at our friend Charlie Luciano. He was tougher than Maranzano: he killed the son of a bitch. Plus he was smart enough to pull it off without having to go to war with the Castellammarese. A guy like that, that's what it takes."

  "You're pretty smart yourself," Loretto said. When she didn't respond, he added,

  "You think Vince is up to the job?"

  "Me and Vince," she said. Her coy smile came back then, and she added a wink for good measure.

  Outside, the dirt roads had given way to gravel and then to pavement. Averill Park was a small enough town that you could drive through it and not notice if your thoughts drifted off for a minute. They were coming up on the feed and grain store, where a wagon with two missing front wheels knelt in a puddle of light from the storefront.

  "So you'll do it, then?" Lottie asked. "You'll talk to Vince?"

  "Sure," Loretto said. "He should hold off and wait for the right moment to hit back. I can tell him that."

  "Good," Lottie said. Then she repeated, "He respects you. He'll listen to you."

  "If he respects me so much," Loretto said, "how come he's got me loading trucks?"

  "Maybe he don't want any competition." Lottie squeezed Loretto's knee.

  On the tree-lined street where Florence was staying, Loretto rolled his window down and stuck his head out of the car. The night air was crisp and cold against his face, and above him the sky was alight with a maze of stars. Sometimes the stars here were so bright they scared him. Earlier in the week, on another Albany roadhouse-to-warehouse run, he'd seen what he understood now was a falling star. At the time, he hadn't known what to make of it. He'd been in the back of the truck, stretched out on a line of whiskey crates, watching road and sky rush away when he'd seen a brilliant blue light streak across the sky. He'd jumped off the whiskey crates so suddenly that he'd nearly fallen out the back of the truck. Since then, he was always looking up at the sky, hoping to again see something so spectacular. By the time he rolled up the window and straightened out his hair and put his cap back on, he had shaken off much of his fatigue. Lottie parked on the street, close to a narrow sidewalk and a row of tall hedges. Unlike everyplace Loretto had lived before, the streets here were utterly dark at night, not a lamppost to be found anywhere. The only light came from an unseen window behind the hedges.

  Lottie stepped out of the car and said, "I can't see a damn thing!"

  Loretto followed her voice, took her by the hand, and led her toward the dim light coming from the house—and then tripped when his foot caught on a chunk of narrow sidewalk pushed up by the roots of a tree. Lottie yanked on his arm and kept him from falling on his face. Once they passed the hedges and turned at the driveway, they were facing Florence's place, a nondescript single-story clapboard house painted a dull yellow. Jack Diamond's flashy Chrysler Imperial was parked in the driveway. Shorty—the ex–football player who worked as Jack's bodyguard—waited outside the house. Wrapped in a full-length raccoon coat, he looked like a giant animal guarding the door.

  Lottie looked over Shorty in his coat and said, "Jeez, did someone forget to tell me it was winter?"

  Shorty coughed into his hand and answered politely, in his one-syllableat-a-time manner, "I got thin blood. I get cold easy."

  Behind them, Tuffy pulled into the driveway and hurried out of the car. "Am I late to the party?" He had managed to get himself cleaned up and changed into a suit. He straightened the knot on his tie.

  Inside, Vince and Jack, with a gallon bottle of gin between them, were seated across from each other at the dining room table, Florence and her husband, Joe, to the right of Vince and Patsy, and Mike to the left of Jack. Frank sat at one end of the table, to the left of Vince, and Tuffy took the empty seat at the other end of the table. The house was run-
down, with peeling wallpaper and water stains on the ceiling and walls. Jack and Vince were puffing on cigars, and the dining room smelled of smoke.

  Sally peeked out of the kitchen. "You boys want something to eat?" Her question was directed to Loretto. "We're making spaghetti and meatballs."

  Loretto had pulled a chair next to Mike. "I could eat," he said.

  "Not me," Tuffy said. "I'm watching my figure."